Sunday, August 31, 2008

The basics of making profits and money on eBay consists of the following factors:

How many items you have in auction on a regular basis (during the week or month).

How many successful auctions you have during that period.

How much profit you average from those items - or your minimum profit. (This is actual profit, what you get in as payment minus all of eBay and PayPal's fees, and minus your actual manufacturing and shipping costs.)

These relate like this:

Items x successful auctions x profits = money made.

4 items with 4 successful auctions and $5.00 profit each is $80.

Now you can use this to figure out backwards how much money you want to get during your weekly/monthly period.

If your items average $5.00 profit each, and you want to make $1,000 per month - then you have to have a lot of successful auctions with a few items, or a lot of items with a few successful auctions - or some combination.

Divide $1K into $5.00 chunks and you get 200. So you need 20 items with 10 successful sales each. Or 200 items that sell once. Or 2 items that sell successfully 100 times.

Obviously, if you can make $20 or $50 per auction, then you need to have fewer successful auctions and/or fewer items.

Really, that's the simplicity of it.

Now if you have an item that sells 50% of the time, you are going to have to have twice as many auctions to meet the needed successful-auction quota. And this is why I bring up how many items, because you can actually be your own worst competition by listing too frequently. But the same doesn't necessarily go for having similar items in the same category - people may buy all of your items and so increase your items' success rates.

So you'll need to have some sort of research tool, or compile your own success data so that you can actually figure what you have to do in order to make yourself a pile of money on eBay.